The present invention is directed to improvements in beverage receptacles. Traditionally, the majority of beverage receptacles were made of glass. This included everyday reusable glassware, beer and soda bottles, wine bottles, milk jugs, and the like. However, glass receptacles are fragile and thus difficult to transport. To address this problem, as well as others, beverage receptacles made from a number of different materials came about. These materials include different varieties of plastic as well as aluminum. However, the overwhelming majority of these materials were designed to create a rigid beverage receptacle. It was commonly accepted that a semi-rigid beverage receptacle was undesirable. For example, compression of the sides of a receptacle could reduce its effective volume leading to spillage. Nevertheless, when the need for cheaper and/or disposable beverage receptacles came along, semi-rigid materials such as thinner plastics, paper, and polystyrene foam were used. However, these cheaper beverage receptacles all suffered from the same problem—they were subject to fatigue and failure.
Despite the disadvantages of disposable beverage receptacles, they do offer some advantages, including being easily deformed and/or compressed. Furthermore, as opposed to receptacles made from glass, disposable beverage receptacles are less fragile. Such characteristics reduce the storage space needed for such receptacles, when not full of a select beverage. However, due to fatigue, any significant deformation or folding typically results in a tear, rendering the receptacle inoperable, and therefore the value of these features are realized only after the receptacle has been thrown away and it is being hauled off.
Therefore it is an object of the present invention to provide a semi-rigid beverage receptacle which exhibits the ability to deform and/or be compressed without suffering from fatigue. It is a further object of the invention to provide semi-rigid beverage receptacle with sufficiently rigid sides to prevent undesirable spilling when in use, while remaining flexible enough so as to be foldable and compressible when not in use. It is a still further object of the invention to provide a beverage receptacle which is, for all practical purposes, unbreakable.